I’ve never really felt helpless. No matter how bad something seems, I’ve found comfort in being able to find some kind of solution.
But after eight months of watching my mum suffer in pain on an NHS Fife waiting list, it’s a feeling I’ve become far too familiar with.
So too has anger. To watch someone you love so much truly suffer in agony because of a broken system is as maddening as it is heartbreaking.
Despite access to Scotland’s political leaders, with the first ministers’ phone number and a platform in one the country’s best selling newspapers — there is nothing I can do to ease the suffering of the person who has given me so much.
But my position should not allow us to jump queues, if anything, it has shown me how we are far from alone.
Cruel hopelessness
It is this especially cruel kind of hopelessness my family, like thousands of others across Scotland, is having to endure.
My mum, Wendy, is waiting on a complex orthopaedic operation on both her ankles.
The recovery period is 12 months, and with surgeons only able to operate on one ankle at a time, her recovery will be a long and brutal one.
But it’s a journey she isn’t likely to start any time soon. Her surgeon advises it will be at least two years before he can operate, regardless of Scottish patients having a legal right to treatment within 12 weeks.
“The Scottish Government aren’t paying us to do the operations we need to do,” is what the consultant said bluntly at a recent appointment.
In the meantime she is left entirely bed bound in excruciating pain, reliant on addictive opioid painkillers of ever increasing strength.
The swelling has made her legs look almost inhuman, causing infections and ulcers. Images that would be too graphic to publish on these pages.
I recently visited the new national treatment centre for orthopaedic surgery in Fife, where Humza Yousaf – as first minister – announced £50 million to help tackle long waiting lists.
I was seething on the inside as we toured the facility, empty due to a bank holiday, because I knew that not a week before my mum had been told she will wait a further 18 months.
In an interview with me after his tour, Mr Yousaf admitted things weren’t good enough but said he was doing something.
As a professional, impartial reporter, I had no right to reveal my own fury, or to point out that I thought he should be ashamed to boast of any progress.
My job is not criticise politicians or to share my own views, but to report on them fairly and allow you, The Courier’s readers, to make up your own minds.
NHS cannot do what it needs to do
But the naked truth is, the NHS cannot do what we need it to do.
Waiting lists cannot be reduced as new cases pile up on top of the cases cancelled due to Covid-19 and the backlog that existed even before the pandemic.
Health boards are managing a system that simply does not work.
In Tayside, insiders told me this week they fear multi-million pound cuts imposed by the government will worsen the situation.
“It’s like trying to fill a bucket with a hole in it,” one source said.
As a country, we often point to countries like the USA, where people are hit with medical bills totalling tens or even hundreds of thousands of pounds.
‘All too easy to say this could be solved with more money’
As I watch my mum’s suffering and I report on the devastating reality in the NHS, I’m not sure we are really in any position to be dishing out advice to others.
But the political response is gratingly unchanged: predictably boasting of real-terms increases to budgets while blaming Brexit, Covid and Westminster, as if this is any consolation to those dying on waiting lists.
As voters, we must expect more from our political leaders than excuses. We are allowed to expect answers.
It would be all too easy to say this could be solved with just more money, it also comes down to tragically poor planning when it comes to staff.
NHS Fife now in waiting list perma-crisis
In Fife, there are two foot and ankle specialists who can carry out my mum’s surgery. There are similarly low numbers of these highly trained surgeons in other health boards.
With more than 250 on her own surgeon’s waiting list, a number only growing day-by-day, it’s obvious why they are powerless to act sooner.
I no longer believe most of us are more likely than not to receive the very best healthcare.
Our system now seems to be in a perma-crisis, doing what it can but unable to do what it needs to do. We simply can’t continue to just hope that it will improve.
The government must now be honest.
Creative answers and a radical re-design may be our best last hope.
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